A while back I made a pretty conscious effort to put my music project on hiatus while I dealt with real life things like Trying to Get a Real Job and Trying to Function Like a Serious Adult Human Being Because I Am Not Getting Any Younger. I planned on it only being a few months to a year, but now it’s been over two years since I’ve released anything of substance. It’s a deeply frustrating feeling to suddenly have your main sources of stress relief and decompression (for me, both writing music and writing prose) become incredibly difficult and stressful things to do with your free time. At a certain point, busting out my gameboys or fiddling around with ableton just became too stressful, too tedious, to be any fun or use to me, so I went deep into watching tv shows and reading books. I recently had a bug and rodent problem in my house that led to a very hectic rearrangement of the entire upstairs for spraying and laying down traps and poison. The silver lining of this incredibly annoying situation is I had the opportunity to fully rearrange my desk and computer situation to make it far more comfortable to spend a long period of time working. It’s easy to forget how much just having a comfortable workspace helps ease the tedium of writing music or learning a new DAW. This is becoming very obnoxiously like a stream of consciousness exercise, so I’m gonna stop before I start to really ramble, but; the point of this post is twofold:

1.) I’m trying to make use of this expensive ass squarespace that I’m still paying for, for god knows what reason.2.) I just wanted to let it be known that I am getting back to making music and I will hopefully have some new stuff to show off, chiptune or no, in the coming months.

My artistic output has not been what I’ve wanted it to be for a few years now. My workflow around writing (prose and music) has slowed down to a glacial pace, due to life issues seemingly beyond my control always taking precedent. The older I get, the less good I feel about spending time working on hobbies instead of doing things that could generate an income. It’s very hard to seriously pick up a gameboy and try to write music when it feels far more productive to endlessly scan craigslist for job postings. I’ve been out of school and unemployed for about a year, and since august, I’ve moved back home with my parents. For money, I’ve been following my step-father around on his contracting jobs. Laying floors, painting, etc. It’s very unreliably though, and I end up in situations where I’m not working for a whole month and student loan payments (the ones I can no longer avoid) will dry up my reserves and leave me at square one. I’m not dying on the street or anything, but it’s very hard to not be incredibly discouraged by many aspects of my life currently. I’m turning 28 this year and aside from a pretty solid twitter feed and some pretty good chipmusic EP’s, I really don’t have much going for me. Multiple times in the past year, I have stared blankly at my musical gear, or at a new ableton project and seriously contemplated just giving up. The stress from job hunting, not having any money, not feeling independent enough, not really feeling like an adult capable of taking care of myself financially, really sucks all the motivation to do anything other than fix those problems out of me. Sometimes I wake up all I can do is stare at my ceiling or my tv.

During a particularly bad two days, I re-watched all of Evangelion for the first time since I was a teen. I’m saving the bulk of my opinions for a later date, but I was honestly shocked at how much it still affected me as an adult. There isn’t much to say that hasn’t already been said by a million people, but at this stage of my life I definitely felt spoken to with regards to the theme of the young pilots dealing with failure in the face of being expected to succeed against seemingly insurmountable odds. Underperforming when failure seems completely out of the option. And honestly, totally flaming out when those failures do occur. Being crushed by your own expectations, and the expectations of others. I’ll be blunt and say that for much of my adult life I have felt like a total failure. My achievements during these years have only served as bandaids over this overall feeling. Each victory came with a loss. Each Angel defeated came with another battle that didn’t end as well. My Associates Degree came with a horrendous breakup, family stress and an uncomfortable period of unemployment. My first performance out of the country (Montreal) came with one of the most soul crushing retail jobs I have ever had. My first performance at a chipmusic festival came with financial aid issues and not being able to pay my own rent. My Bachelor’s degree came with terrible job interviews to no avail, and an even longer period of dodging loans while severely unemployed.

What am I getting at with all this. I dunno. I guess Eva did again what it did before, and what its always done: helped me recognize and compartmentalize the whole mess of feelings I had and still have swimming all around me at all times. Right now I strongly empathize Shinji in that folding chair, holding my head, trying to understand and process all his misery and self loathing. With Asuka losing all her will to fight after one to many traumatic encounters. All I want is to get through all of this, whatever it is I'm going through, to be able to accept myself, to not constantly feel like giving up. To feel worthwhile and to feel wanted. To achieve my goals, and be congratulated by my friends, family, and a weirdly sentient penguin.

The first post on any new blog/website/project is always the hardest to write, so I will do you all the favor of not trying to be overly precious or clever about it. Welcome to the first blog entry on Dauragon.com. I will periodically be writing here whenever I feel inspired to reveal pieces of my process, or when I have exciting news that deserves a little more than a tweet, or when I just have some jams stuck in my head that I feel compelled to share. Or hell, maybe I'll drop a bunch of editorial about whatever on here. The sky is the limit and this is the first time I've actually paid for a Real Website.

So anyway, a song/video that has been stuck in my head since I first heard it over the summer is KOTO's プラトニックプラネット (or Platonic Planet, according to google translate and my barely surface level Japanese language skill).

I love everything about this video and this song. I am a sucker for music that has serious locomotion to it, and this song has it in spades. That plus this video being shot on an actual 80's TV camera like idol videos of yore (and like the idol videos that tons of vaporwave peeps have been mining for trippy vis for a few years) makes it totally captivating to me. Anything that visually makes me think of Yellow Magic Orchestra or Jun Togawa is clearly doing something right. KOTO herself is just also a total joy to watch. This kid goes insanely hard and it's super infectious. Seriously:

This is pretty much what I've been going to for inspiration lately. Don't worry though, I won't be making any Jpop any time soon (at least in THIS form.)